by Maeve Binchy
“Do you think I could?” Signora’s eyes were shining.
“Listen, now.” Suzi was anxious there should be no misunderstandings. “We’re talking about a very ordinary house in an estate of houses that look the same, some a bit better, some a bit worse…it wouldn’t be gracious or anything. They have the telly on all the time, they shout to each other over it and of course my brother’s there, Jerry. He’s fourteen and awful.”
“I just need a place to stay. I’m sure it would be lovely.”
Suzi wrote down the address and told her which bus to take. “Why don’t you go down their road and ask a few people who I know definitely won’t be able to have you and then go by chance as it were to my house and ask. Mention the money first and say it won’t be for long. They’d like you because you’re a bit older like, respectable is what they’ll say. They’ll take you, but don’t say you came from me.”
Signora gave her a long look. “Did they not like your boyfriend?”
“Boyfriends,” Suzi corrected her. “My father says I’m a slut, but please don’t try to deny it when he tells you, because it will show you’ve met me.” Suzi’s face looked hard.
Signora wondered had her own face been hard like that when she set out for Sicily all those years ago.
SHE TOOK THE bus and wondered at how the city she had once lived in had grown and spread so wide. In the evening light children played in the streets among the traffic, and then they went farther afield, in where there were small gardens and children cycled round in circles, leaning on gates and running in and out of each other’s gardens.
Signora called at the houses that Suzi had suggested. Dublin men and women told her that their houses were full and they needed all the space they had.
“Can you suggest anyone?” she asked.
“Try the Sullivans,” someone suggested.
Now she had her reason. She knocked on the door. Would this be her new home? Was this the roof she would lie under and hope to ease the pain of losing her life in Annunziata? Not only the man she loved but her whole life, her future, her burial with the bells ringing for her. Everything. She must not try to like it in case they said no.
Jerry opened the door, his mouth was full. He had red hair and freckles and he had a sandwich in his hand.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Could I speak to your mother or your father please?”
“What about?” Jerry asked.
This was a household where he had obviously welcomed in people who should not have been welcomed in the past.
“I was wondering if I could rent a room,” Signora began. She knew that inside they had turned down the television to hear what was happening on the doorstep.
“A room here?” Jerry was so utterly disbelieving that Signora thought maybe he was right, it did seem a foolish notion. But then her life had been based on a series of foolish notions. Why stop now?
“So perhaps I could talk to them?”
The boy’s father came to the door. A big man with tufts of hair on each side of his head, looking like handles that he could be lifted by. He was about Signora’s age, she supposed, but red-faced and as if the years had taken their toll. He was wiping his hands down the sides of his trousers, as if about to shake hands.
“Can I help you?” he said suspiciously.
Signora explained that she had been looking for a place in the area, and that the Quinns in number 22 had sent her over here in case they might have a spare room. She sort of implied that she had known the Quinns; it gave her an introduction.
“Peggy, will you come out here?” he called. And a woman with tired, dark shadows under her eyes and straight hair pushed behind her ears came out smoking and coughing at the same time.
“What is it?” she asked unwelcomingly.
It was not very promising, but Signora told her tale again.
“And what has you looking for a room up in this area?”
“I have been away from Ireland for a long time, I don’t know many places now but I do need somewhere to live. I had no idea that things had become so expensive and…well…I came out this way because you can see the mountains from here,” she said.
For some reason this seemed to please them. Maybe it was because it was so without guile.
“We never had boarders,” the woman said.
“I would be no trouble, I would sit in my room.”
“You wouldn’t want to eat with us?” The man indicated a table with a plate of very thick, unappetizing sandwiches, butter still in its foil paper, and the milk still in the bottle.
“No, no thank you so much. Suppose I were to buy an electric kettle, I eat mainly salads, and I suppose I could have an electric ring thing. You know, to heat up soups?”
“You haven’t even seen the room,” the woman said.
“Can you show it to me?” Her voice was gentle but authoritative.
Together they all walked up the stairs, watched by Jerry from below.
It was a small room with a handbasin. An empty wardrobe and an empty bookcase, no pictures on the walls. Not much memory of the years that the beautiful, vibrant Suzi with her long dark red hair and her flashing eyes had spent in this room.
Outside the window it was getting dark. The room was at the back of the house. It looked out over wasteland that would soon be more houses, but at the moment there was nothing between her and the mountain.
“It’s good to have a beautiful view like this,” Signora said. “I have been living in Italy, they would call this Vista del Monte, mountain view.”
“That’s the name of the school the young lad goes to, Mountainview,” said the big man.
Signora smiled at him. “If you’ll have me, Mrs. Sullivan, Mr. Sullivan…I think I’ve come to a lovely place,” she said.
She saw them exchange glances, wondering was she cracked in the head, were they wise to let her into the house.
They showed her the bathroom. They would tidy it up a bit, they said, and give her a rack for her towel.
THEY SAT DOWNSTAIRS and talked, and it was as if her very gentleness seemed to impose more manners on them. The man cleared the food away from the table, the woman put out her cigarette and turned off the television. The boy sat in the far corner watching with interest.
They explained that there was a couple across the road who made a living out of informing the tax offices on other people’s business, and if she did come, she would have to be a relation so that the busybodies couldn’t report there was a paying guest contributing to the household expenses.
“A cousin maybe.” Signora seemed excited at the thought of the subterfuge.
She told them she had lived long years in Italy, and having seen several pictures of the Pope and the Sacred Heart on the walls, she added that her Italian husband had died there recently and she had come home to Ireland to make her life here.
“And have you no family here?”
“I do have some relations. I will look them up in time,” said Signora, who had a mother, a father, two sisters, and two brothers living in this city.
They told her that times were hard and that Jimmy worked as a driver, freelance sort of. Hackney cabs, vans, whatever was going, and that Peggy worked in the supermarket at the checkout.
And then the conversation came back to the room upstairs.
“The room belonged to someone else in the family?” Signora inquired politely.
They told her of a daughter who preferred to live nearer the city. Then they talked of money, and she showed them her wallet. She had five weeks rent. Would they like a month in advance? she wondered.
They looked at each other, the Sullivans, faces anxious. They were suspicious of unworldly people like this who showed you their entire wallet.
“Is that all you have in the world?”
“It’s all I have now but I will have more when I get some work.” Signora seemed unruffled by the thought of it. They were still uneasy. “Perhaps I could step outside while you talk it ov
er,” she said, and went out to the back garden, where she looked at the distant, faraway mountains that some people called hills. They weren’t rugged and sharp and blue like her mountains were back in Sicily.
People would be going about their business there in Annunziata. Would any of them wonder about Signora and where she was going to lay her head tonight?
THE SULLIVANS CAME to the door, their decision made.
“I suppose, being a bit short and everything, you’ll want to stay immediately, if you are going to be here that is?” said Jimmy Sullivan.
“Oh, tonight would be great,” Signora said.
“Well, you can come for a week and if you like us and we like you we can talk about it being for a bit longer,” Peggy said.
Signora’s eyes lit up. “Grazie, grazie,” she said before she could help herself. “I lived there so long, you see,” she said apologetically.
They didn’t mind, she was obviously a harmless eccentric.
“Come on up and help me make the bed,” Peggy said.
Young Jerry’s eyes followed them wordlessly.
“I’ll be no trouble, Jerry,” Signora said.
“How did you know I was called Jerry?” he asked.
Surely his parents must have spoken to him. This was a slipup, but Signora was used to covering her tracks. “Because it’s your name,” she said simply.
And it seemed to satisfy him.
Peggy got out sheets and blankets. “Suzi had one of those candlewick bedspreads but she took it with her when she went,” Peggy said.
“Do you miss her?”
“She comes round once a week, but usually when her father’s out. They never saw eye to eye, not since she was about ten years of age. It’s a pity but that’s the way it is. Better for her to live on her own rather than all the barneys they had here.”
Signora unpacked the coverlet with all the Italian place names embroidered on it. She had wrapped it in tissue paper and had used it to keep her jug safe. She had brought few possessions with her, she was happy to unpack them so that Peggy Sullivan could see how blameless and innocent was her lifestyle.
Peggy’s eyes were round with amazement.
“Where on earth did you get that, it’s beautiful.” She gaped.
“I made it myself over the years, adding names here and there. Look, there’s Rome, and that’s Annunziata, the place I lived.”
Peggy’s eyes had tears in them. “And you and he lay under this…how sad that he died.”
“Yes, yes it was.”
“Was he sick for a long time?”
“No, killed in an accident.”
“Do you have a picture of him, to put up here maybe?” Peggy patted the top of the chest of drawers.
“No, I have no pictures of Mario, only in my heart and mind.”
The words hung there between them.
Peggy Sullivan decided to talk of something else. “I tell you if you can do sewing like that it won’t be long till you get a job. Anyone would take you on.”
“I never thought of earning my living by sewing.” Signora’s face was far away.
“Well, what were you going to take up?”
“Teaching maybe, being a guide. I used to sell little embroidered things, fine-detailed work for tourists in Sicily. But I didn’t think they’d want them here.”
“You could do shamrocks and harps, I suppose,” Peggy said. But neither of them liked the thought of it very much. They finished the room. Signora hung up her few garments and seemed well pleased with it all.
“Thank you for giving me a new home so quickly. I was just saying to your son I’ll be no trouble.”
“Don’t mind him, he’s trouble enough for us all, bone-idle lazy. He has our hearts broken. At least Suzi’s bright, that fellow will end in the gutter.”
“I’m sure it’s just a phase.” Signora had talked like this to Mario about his sons, soothing, optimistic. It was what parents wanted to hear.
“It’s a long phase if that’s what it is. Listen, will you come down and have a drink with us before you go to bed?”
“No, thank you. I’ll start as I mean to go on. I’m tired now. I’ll sleep.”
“But you don’t even have a kettle to make yourself a cup of tea.”
“Thank you, truly I am fine.”
Peggy left her and went downstairs. Jimmy had a sports program on television. “Turn it down a bit, Jimmy. The woman’s tired, she’s been traveling all day.”
“God Almighty, is it going to be like when those two were babies, shush this and shush that?”
“No it’s not, and you’re as anxious for her money as I am.”
“She’s as odd as two left shoes. Did you get anything out of her at all?”
“She says she was married and her husband was killed in an accident. That’s what she says.”
“And you don’t believe her, obviously?”
“Well, she has no picture of him. She doesn’t look married. And she’s got this thing on the bed. It’s like a priest’s vestment, a quilt. You’d never have time to do that if you were married.”
“You read too many books and see too many films, that’s your trouble.”
“She is a bit mad though, Jimmy, not the full shilling.”
“She’s hardly an ax murderer, is she?”
“No, but she might have been a nun, she has that sort of still way about her. I’d say that’s what she was. Is, even. You never know these days.”
“It could be.” Jimmy was thoughtful. “Well, in case she is a nun don’t be too free with telling her all that Suzi gets up to. She’d be out of here in a flash if she knew how that young rossie that we reared carries on.”
SIGNORA STOOD AT her window and looked across the waste ground at the mountains.
Could this place ever be her home?
Would she give in when she saw a mother and father more frail and dependent than when she had left? Would she forgive their slights and their coldness, the lack of response once they knew she was not going to run home obediently and do the single daughter’s duty for them?
Or would she stay in this small shabby house with noisy people banging around downstairs, a sullen boy, a disaffected daughter? Signora knew she would be kind to this family, the Sullivans, whom she had never met before this day.
She would try to bring about a reconciliation between Suzi and her father. She would find some way to interest the sullen child in his work. In time she would hem the curtains, she would mend the frayed cushions in the sitting room, and put ribbon on the edges of the towels in the bathroom. But she would do it slowly. Her years in Annunziata had taught her patience.
She would not go tomorrow and look at her mother’s house or visit the home where her father lived.
She would, however, go to see Brenda and Pillow Case and she would remember to refer to him as Patrick. They would be even more pleased to see her once they realized she had found herself accommodation and was about to look for work. Maybe they might even have something in their restaurant. She could wash up and prepare vegetables in the kitchen, like the boy who had married Mario’s daughter.
Signora washed and undressed. She put on the white nightdress with the little rosebuds she had embroidered around the neckline. Mario had said he loved it; she remembered his hands stroking the rosebuds before he would stroke her.
Mario, asleep now in a graveyard that looked out over the valleys and mountains. He had known her well in the end, known she would follow his advice after his death even though she had not done so in his lifetime. Still, all in all he was probably glad she had stayed, glad she had come and lived in his village for twenty-six years, and he would be glad to know that she had left as he wanted her to do, to give his widow dignity and respect.
She had made him happy so often under this very quilt and wearing this very nightdress. She had made him happy by listening to his worries, stroking his head, and giving him gentle thoughts and suggestions. She listened to the strange unfamiliar d
ogs barking and the children shouting to each other.
Soon she would sleep and tomorrow her new life would start.
BRENDA ALWAYS WALKED through the dining room of Quentin’s at midday. It was a routine. In a nearby church the Angelus rang over a Dublin that rarely paused to acknowledge it by saying prayers these days, as people had done when Brenda was a young girl. She wore a plain-colored dress always with a crisp clean white collar. Her makeup was freshly applied, and she checked each table carefully. The waiters knew they might as well get it right in the beginning because Brenda had such high standards. Mr. Quentin, who lived abroad, always said that his name was good in Dublin entirely due to Brenda and Patrick, and Brenda wanted to keep it that way.
Most of the staff had been there for a while; they knew each other’s ways and worked well as a team. There were regular customers, who all liked to be addressed by name, and Brenda had stressed how important it was to remember small details about the customers. Had they enjoyed their holiday? Were they writing a new book? Glad to see their photograph in the Irish Times, nice to hear their horse won at the Curragh.
Although her husband, Patrick, thought that they came for the food, Brenda knew that their clientele came to be welcomed, and to be made much of as well. She had spent too many years being nice to people who were nobodies, watching them turn into somebodies and always remembering the flattering reception they got in Quentin’s. This was the basis of the regular lunch trade, even when economic times were meant to be hard and belts were reported to be in need of tightening.
Brenda adjusted the flowers on a table by the window and heard the door opening. Nobody came to lunch at this time. Dubliners were late lunch-eaters anyway, and Quentin’s never saw anyone until well after twelve-thirty.
The woman came in hesitantly. She was about fifty or maybe more, long hair streaked in gray but with the remains of red in it, and it was tied back loosely with a colored scarf. She wore a long brown skirt almost to her ankles and an old-fashioned jacket, like people wore way back in the seventies. She was neither shabby nor smart, she was just totally different. She was about to approach Nell Dunne, already seated in her place at the cash desk, when Brenda realized who she was.
